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The term culture, according to Raymond Williams (1983) is one of the most complicated words in the English language (87), despite that he proposes three definitions. In the first one, he implies that culture can be used to refer to a ‘general process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development’ (90). A second usage of the term suggests a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, or a group’, and a third usage of the term ‘culture’ can be used to refer to ‘the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity’.
British academic and critic F.R Leavis, who opened the first popular culture educational space in Britain, said that minorities are the ones who keep the culture and that their authority has lost its power since the mid-20th century. Richard Hoggart, another British academic who studied the works of Leavis said that although the decline in popular culture morals manifests in modern times, it is rather the decline of the culture provided for the masses and that most people can resist the manipulation of popular culture. ’The working classes have a strong natural ability to survive change by adapting or assimilating what they want in the new and ignoring the rest’ (32). He also wrote 'Class distinctions do not die, they merely learn new ways of expressing themselves' Richard Hoggart, 'The Uses of Literacy' (1957).
This is undoubtedly relevant to the modern times that we live in. In the last decade, social media had an unprecedented ascension globally, thus influencing the whole world, from the youngest to the oldest internet user. Social media pop culture gave birth to vines, memes, challenges, live streams, and vlogs, gave a new meaning to the word ‘viral’, and all that through the creative mind of the average internet user. As people seem to function more than ever in the digital world, culture has also migrated to cyberspace, where, like any human biological product, it keeps changing and evolving to suit the needs of modern times regarding creativity and art in this case. The Internet has its own culture with certain roots in academia. For example, the word ‘meme’ comes from the Greek term ‘mimema’, meaning to imitate. Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist describes the word ‘meme’ in his book ‘The Selfish Gene’ (1976) as ‘a unit of cultural transmission or imitation’. Memes use multimodal grammar (images and captions) which in a certain way resemble Egyptian hieroglyphs or ancient rock carving art.
The rapid globalization of social media cultivated a new generation of young musicians who are not dependent on a record label, contrary to the 80s or 90’s era when an artist or a band had to go through the demands and ideology of a certain oligopolistic market to make himself or themselves heard or known. This type of social virtual environment developed the so-called ‘bedroom producers’, who produce music using low-cost technology such as VSTs and MIDI instruments in their minimalistic bedroom studio. Every youth nowadays is connected to at least one social media app thus this new type of internet pop art is quickly assimilated by them. However, things were different two decades ago when information spread mostly through television and magazines, youths had a sense of music as being something that they owned physically, either on a tape, a vinyl, or a CD, thus exchanging music between peers, or discovering new music was a physical experience, needing to go to the record shop to buy a record.
In 2003, the early emerging social media network Myspace was designed to provide an online platform for independent artists, and a few years later it formed one of the first internationally rapidly surfacing fanbases for newly formed groups like ‘Panic! At the Disco’ or ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ who managed to easily get signed by a record label due to hundreds of thousands of fans engaged with their music through social media. In more recent times, Myspace had a serious decline in usage among youths, and more and more independent musicians turned to Soundcloud as their starting platform. Famous rappers like Post Malone, Migos, 21 Savage, and Chance the Rapper started their ascension through Soundcloud.
There is no doubt that through social media youth culture can express itself freely, on the other hand, the overly saturated popular music industry and the increase of violence, drug abuse, and promiscuous and explicit sexual content could hurt adolescents. Drug, alcohol, violence, racism, and homophobia are increasingly glorified among hip-hop popular music. An example of drugs being glorified in popular music in recent times is the 2015 Grammy-nominated song for ‘Best Record of the Year’ and ‘Best Pop Solo Performance’ titled ‘Can’t Feel My Face’ by ‘The Weeknd’. The song peaked at number one on the US Billboard Top 100, and Canadian Top 100, also in Denmark, Ireland, and New Zealand, and top 10 in Australia, The Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom. With over a billion plays on YouTube ‘Can’t feel my face’ The Weeknd personifies his cocaine addiction as a dangerous romantic partner. This trend of drug-centered songs can be observed through other popular modern tracks like O.T Genasis’ ‘I’m in Love with the Coco’, meaning ‘I’m in Love with Cocaine’, ‘High by the Beach’ by Lana del Ray, Ed Sheeran’s ‘The A Team’, Miley Cyrus MDMA reference on ‘We can’t stop’ and not so recent ‘Rehab’ by Amy Winehouse, all of which were Hot 100 Hits. Popular music brings the focal point of the lyrics to the usage of drugs after an absence of this tendency within the last decades, resembling the late 60s and early 70s when songs like ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ and ‘Day Tripper’ by the Beatles, also ‘Mary Jane’ by Rick James were top songs. In the early 80s hip hop condemned drug dealers through songs like ‘The Message’(1982) by The Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five using lyrics like ‘You'll admire all the number-book takers, thugs, pimps and pushers and the big money-makers ... but now your eyes sing the sad, sad song of how you lived so fast and died so young'.
Some might argue that adolescents use music solely for entertainment purposes and little or no attention is given to the lyrics, and, if any attention is given, understanding tends to be limited and related to experiences lived by the listener 32, 55. Other studies show the exact opposite, 52 where 17% of male adolescents and 25% of female adolescents who took part in the study revealed that they liked their favorite songs especially because of the lyrics echoing their feelings 2, and the more engaged a teenager is with a certain type of music the more will pay attention to the lyrics.
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